


Dissolution

by osprey_archer



Series: Bolsheviks [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 18:19:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7768273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/osprey_archer/pseuds/osprey_archer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When the Soldier wakes again, the room is dim. His shoulder aches, deep to the bone, and he is not sure where he is. He tries to sit up, and his new arm flashes in the light as it moves. The Soldier freezes and stares at it and tucks the shiny metal under the sheets. </i>
</p><p>The Soldier isn't happy when they defrost him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dissolution

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to littlerhymes and lucymonster for betaing this!

1956

When the Soldier wakes again, the room is dim. His shoulder aches, deep to the bone, and he is not sure where he is. He tries to sit up, and his new arm flashes in the light as it moves. The Soldier freezes and stares at it and tucks the shiny metal under the sheets. 

“Soldat?” Grisha says. The Soldier turns toward the voice, and jerks back at the sight of Grisha’s face: deeply lined, nose red with broken capillaries, mouth and cheeks sunken over missing teeth. 

It should not surprise him. The Soldier has seen Grisha’s new face before, saw Grisha the very first time he woke: Zola brought him in after the Soldier attacked the doctors attaching his new arm. _You see? Grigorii Mikhailovitch is here. Everything is all right, Soldat._

_That’s not Grisha! That’s some dirty old bum from the streets!_

But it is Grisha. The Soldier has been frozen for a decade, and in that time Grisha has aged at least thirty years, and Stalin has died, and the Soldier gazes at Grisha’s face with an icy panic flowing through his limbs. “What happened to you?” the Soldier asks, although Grisha has already told him. 

“I went to the gulag after you were frozen.”

The Soldier looks away. He gazes fixedly at the sterile white walls that have turned grayish in the dim light. “I guess it’s my fault,” he says. He’s so tired. 

“It’s Stalin’s fault,” Grisha says, and the Soldier flinches despite himself. “Soldat, he’s dead.”

“I know,” the Soldier says. “You told me.”

It won’t sink in. Stalin dead? Easier to kill the sun. 

But it must be true. He cannot imagine Stalin would have let that fascist pig Zola into the country. “Get rid of Zola,” the Soldier says.

This conversation, too, they have had before. Grisha sighs and shifts on his seat. “He’s already gone back to America, Soldat.”

“I never want to see him again.”

“He’s the one who designed your new arm, Soldat. We may have to – ”

“I don’t want to see him again!” the Soldier yells. “I didn’t need a new arm anyway!”

Grisha frowns. “Don’t shout, Soldat,” he says. “We had to get you a new metal arm. The first one was destroyed.” 

When he ran down the hill to try to save Agnessa. Strafed by a machine gun. Lucky the metal arm was all it hit. 

_Lucky_.

“We had to bring in someone,” Grisha says. He sounds tired. His missing teeth make his voice mushy and indistinct. “Yegor Kirilovitch was shot in ‘47, and his research destroyed. We have no one in the Soviet Union who could replace your metal arm.” 

“So you brought in a fascist,” the Soldier says. 

“He’s working for the Americans,” Grisha says. 

“Who are imperialist capitalist pigs,” the Soldier counters. His voice trembles with the effort of not shouting. “He’s a Nazi.” 

“He’s not a Nazi – ”

“He is!” the Soldier roars. 

Silence. The faint electrical hum of the medical equipment fills the air. The Soldier is breathing hard. Grisha doesn’t speak. 

“I don’t want to see him again,” the Soldier says. He wants to sound charming, wheedling, but instead he sounds sullen. 

“He’s gone back to America,” Grisha repeats, and closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them, he says, “He won’t be back. I can arrange it.”

The Soldier breathes out slowly. Another silence follows. The Soldier sinks against his hard pillow. He closes his eyes. Ten years he’s been asleep in the ice, and he is still so tired. 

He never expected to wake up from the ice at all. He thought it was another fairy story of Grisha’s, and really he was going to die: would probably be shot in the head, like Roman and Petya and Marusya, was lucky that he would at least be shot outside, in the tundra, beneath the dark gray sky. 

Agnessa had died outside too, torn to bits by the machine gun. He realized only later that she was lucky to die that way, instead of being shot in the back of the head in a filthy basement like all the others; and he had been glad he would die beneath the sky, like she had, as if that made a bond beneath them, as if there could be any bonds after death. 

He ought to feel something, he thinks. Thinking of Agnessa ought to make him feel something, and yet the thoughts flow over the surface of his mind, like water streaming over the soaked earth after a torrential rain. 

The Soldier opens his eyes. “Everyone’s dead,” the Soldier says. 

“I know,” says Grisha. “That’s what Stalin has done to us all. But he’s gone, Soldat, and we have a chance to make it all worth it, and build a better world. No one will ever have to suffer as we have suffered ever again.” 

The Soldier closes his eyes again. He squeezes his eyelids shut. 

Grisha lays a hand on his forearm. His fingers are dry and cracked and spidery. The Soldier jerks his arm away. 

“As soon as you’re well,” Grisha says, “we are going to Hungary. Rest, Soldat.”

***

The Soldier only shoots two people in Hungary before the Politburo calls him off. They’re sending in the tanks, they say. Assassinations aren’t dramatic enough, won’t show the Hungarians who’s boss.

Dramatic enough! The Soldier storms through the dark streets, rage billowing off him in black clouds. There are only a few streetlamps left and he shoots the glass out of them as he passes. Dramatic enough! Fuck them! He’s done so much for them, he came here just to shoot people for them, and now they’re stopping him? Fuck them! Why bring him back at all, why do that to him if he’s not even useful to them! 

The Soldier nearly takes the door of the apartment building off its hinges as he enters. He shatters the lamp in the dim stairwell with his rifle butt.

“Soldat,” Grisha says. He’s lying on the couch, and tries to sit up as the Soldier storms in, but the Soldier slams the bedroom door behind him. He doesn’t want another lecture about his bad temper and behavior befitting a Bolshevik and fuck knows what else. He stomps up and down the room. Clumps of mud fall off his boots. 

A series of thuds sound. Someone below is hitting their ceiling with a broom. 

The Soldier drops down to his knees at the spot and slams his metal fist to the floor. It breaks through the hardwood, slams right down through the ceiling below. Someone screams. 

He swipes his hand around. Let them try to hit him with a broom! He’ll take it right out of their hands and beat them to death with it! But the fucking cowards have fled, fucking Hungarians, the Soldier hopes the tanks kill them all. They allied with the Nazis in World War II, they ought to be _grateful_ they’ve been allowed to live, and instead they’re rioting in the streets like a bunch of animals. Animals! They should be dead. They deserve it more than Agnessa ever did. 

He punches the floor with his other fist. His flesh hand doesn’t break the wood. It hurts one of his fingers so badly that he falls sideways on the floor, hand to his chest. He tries to roll up in a ball, but his metal arm is still stuck in the floor, and he has to jerk it free. Plaster dust fills the air, his nose, and he curls up and coughs and gags. 

“Soldat?” calls Grisha. 

Fuck. Grisha won’t be happy about the hole in the floor. “Go away!” yells the Soldier. 

The pain radiates from his hand up his arm, through his body. He hurts all over. He kicks the floor, not to break it, but as if the pain in his foot will distract him from the agony in his hand. 

The bedroom door opens. Grisha shuffles in. The Soldier nearly throws his gun at him, but Grisha looks so unsteady on his feet that the Soldier can’t do it. 

“I broke the floor,” the Soldier snaps, glaring at Grisha, daring him to lecture. 

Grisha just sighs. “Oh, Soldat.” 

The rage goes out of the Soldier like air from a punctured balloon, and he feels small and crumpled and ashamed. What the fuck is wrong with him?

“Everything is terrible, Grisha,” the Soldier says. 

Grisha attempts to sit beside him, but he’s too uncoordinated, and falls instead. “Oh, Soldat. It’s not as bad as all that.” 

“It _is_ ,” the Soldier says, and smacks his palm against the floor. “It _is_ , it _is_ ,” and he punctuates each _is_ with another smack, until Grisha puts both hands around his wrist to stop him, and the Soldier presses his face to the floor and cries. Grisha strokes his hair. He pours vodka over the Soldier’s injured hand and tries to bind it up with a handkerchief. 

“Everything we’ve suffered will be worth it,” Grisha says. “I won’t live to see it, Soldat, but you will. You’ll see Communism some day.”

The Soldier is shaking his head. His eyes are so swollen with tears that it’s hard to see anything in the dim light. 

“It will be beautiful,” Grisha goes on, and his mumbling indistinct voice is gentle and soft. “All over the earth people will live together in harmony. There will be such plenty that there is nothing left to fight over. Great fat loaves of bread, good strong rye bread and bright festival wheat bread, carried by a pretty girl with a wreath of flowers in her hair and long ribbons streaming down behind - and all the girls will be pretty, and all the men will be handsome, and they’ll all be husbands and wives to each other, just like it was in primitive society.” 

Grisha’s hands are not as deft as they once were. He is having trouble wrapping the binding tight, and eventually he just gives up, his hands falling still as he talks on. The Soldier closes his eyes and drifts on the words.

“And all children will grow up happy, _zaichik_. This is why we have to fight and suffer for Communism, so the children of the future can grow up rosy-cheeked and smiling. I used to think Communism would come for your children, but that was too fast - we flew too high, and were burnt by the sun... But your grandchildren, Kolyusha, when you are an old man like me, your grandchildren will run through the silver arcs of the fountains in the summertime…”

The Soldier’s eyes open wide at _Kolyusha_. But Grisha doesn’t notice, simply talks on, one hand on the Soldier’s hair. 

“It will be beautiful, beautiful. All our sufferings will be redeemed when Communism comes. Can you see it, _zaichik_? Even the rabbits will come out, and lie down with the wolves.” 

1960

Back on the ice. Four years pass overnight. They bring the Soldier out of cryo – the Germans have made him a fancy cryogenic chamber, because they don’t trust the good Russian earth – and send him to Cuba to help hunt down counterrevolutionaries.

“You will love it,” Mikoyan says, eyes sparkling. The Soldier and Grisha are in his office in the Kremlin. “The Cubans are true revolutionaries, comrades, it was like a return to my youth when I visited them. It will make you feel like a young man again, Comrade Zefirov.” 

Grisha bows his head. His wrinkled skin has a faint yellowish tinge. He is very thin. 

Cuba is already hot in March. “You should learn Spanish,” Grisha tells him. The Soldier picks up a few words when he heads out into the mountains with his squad, but he makes no effort to learn more. He has nothing to say to these people. He cannot remember most of their names. They scarcely need the Soldier anyway: they’re killing counterrevolutionaries just fine on their own. 

“Why are we here?” the Soldier demands, when he is back in Havana. 

“We’re a gesture of goodwill,” Grisha says. 

Grisha didn’t go with them into the mountains. He never went with the Soldier into the Ukraine, either, so this is not new, not a cause for concern. Grisha is all right. He reads to the Soldier for hours on end, lying on the couch between two open windows in their apartment, the breeze rustling the pages. Sometimes, in between stanzas, he falls asleep.

Once - it is the middle of a battle scene in _War and Peace_ \- the Soldier slips the book from his hands, and tries to go on by himself. He cannot make sense of the letters, and he sets the book aside and goes to stand in the window, feeling the breeze. There is a sign on the pink building across the street. _Panadería_ , the Soldier reads, although he does not know what it means; and it disquiets him, and he leaves the apartment and walks long into the night. 

They stay, and stay, and stay. They attend evening parties. The Soldier trains with the Cuban shock troops. Havana gets hotter. There is nothing for the Soldier to do. He sleeps all night and in the hot afternoons and yet he is tired all the time. 

One night in early May, the Soldier attends a soiree. It’s dark and cool, and a sea breeze blows in through the windows. A woman approaches him, a pretty woman with a round face and cropped dark hair, like Agnessa, and she is speaking to him in charming French and he is staring at her, and she smiles and talks and holds a cigarette in one slender hands and he is seeing bullets rip through her body. 

It’s not a hallucination, he knows it is not real, but it is stronger than imagination: he can’t make the image go away. He turns away abruptly, but the whole room has taken on a nightmarish aspect, as if the people are drifting ghosts or walking corpses. The human body is so frail. He is aware of his own heartbeat, sweat on his skin, how thin a barrier skin is against the night, and it seems impossible that his skin can hold all his blood in when his heart roars in his ears like hurricane winds. 

He leaves. He is not sure how he makes it back to the apartment. He has trouble getting the door open, and when he goes inside he stumbles over Grisha lying on the floor inside the door. 

“Grisha!” the Soldier yells.

Grisha doesn’t answer. The Soldier kicks him, and Grisha makes no answer, and the Soldier falls to his knees beside him. “Grisha,” he said. “Grisha, Grisha please,” and shakes him, and there is a horrible moment when Grisha’s head wobbles slack on his neck. 

But then Grisha coughs, his breath sodden with the scent of alcohol. The Soldier is so relieved he slaps him. “Grisha!” he storms, and he picks Grisha up and carries him to the couch. He gets him a glass of water, and holds it to Grisha’s lips because Grisha can barely raise his hands, and dances out of the way when Grisha vomits on the carpet. Some of it splashes the Soldier’s boots. 

The Soldier covers it with a towel. He gets another glass of water. He sits next to Grisha on the couch and listens to his rasping breath. Even in the moonlight there is a yellowish cast to his cheeks. 

The sky lightens. Grisha breathes more easily. His eyelids creak open, and he looks at the Soldier. “I’m too old for this,” he whispers. “You need someone younger to look after you, Soldat.” 

“I don’t want anyone else,” the Soldier says. He manages a smile, touches Grisha’s hand. “I’ll look after you. Don’t put me on ice again, Grisha, I’ll take care of you.”

Grisha shakes his head. His eyes close. “I can’t do this anymore.”

He’s serious. The Soldier’s stomach goes cold. “No,” he says. “I don’t want anyone else. I won’t work for anyone else, Grisha, I won’t do it. I’ll – I’ll go on hunger strike.” 

“Does this look like tsarism to you? You can’t go on hunger strike, Soldat, no one will care.”

“You’re not leaving!” the Soldier yells. “You can’t go, I won’t let you, I won’t work with anyone else. I’ll kill myself!” 

His heart thumps in his chest. His face flushes painfully. He is not sure he can fulfill his threat.

Grisha’s eyes slit open. He doesn’t say anything, but he turns his hand. The Soldier intertwines their fingers. He lifts Grisha’s hand to his cheek. His skin is cold. 

Grisha doesn’t mention leaving again. Perhaps he only wanted the reassurance that the Soldier still wants him around. 

1964

The Soldier breaks three ribs in a careless fall, so after the mission they go back to the dacha to recuperate. Pelageya makes him borscht and tries to scold Grisha into eating more. Grisha, shrunken and yellow, shakes his head. He spends most of his time lying on the divan. There are half a dozen soldiers there, but the Soldier does not bestir himself to learn their names. 

The Soldier lies sometimes on the rug beside him. Grisha doesn’t read aloud anymore; he recites poetry, Pushin and Tyutchev, Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, poems he learned in his youth and still recites in a strong resonant voice. “You must learn it,” Grisha insists. “Poetry will sustain you when everything is gone.” So the Soldier recites, sweating as he strains to think of nothing but poetry, so he does not have to think about _when everything is gone_ ; and if Grisha tries to speak of something else, the Soldier leaves to spar with the soldiers. 

One day, when the Soldier’s ribs are almost well, Grisha follows him out to the garden. “Soldat,” he says. “We need to talk.”

The Soldier nearly heads for the trees, where Grisha could not possibly follow, but he can’t bring himself to do it. “Pelageya says she’ll make us kissel if I gather enough raspberries,” the Soldier says, wooden. “It’s too much work, making her cook for all these people, I don’t know why we have the soldiers here at all - ”

“That’s what we need to talk about, please, Soldat. The soldiers are here because you’ll need a new handler. I thought, if you could get to know him before – ”

“I don’t need a new handler.”

“Soldat, you will.”

The Soldier moves away from him. “Pelageya says I should gather mushrooms for her too, just where you showed me out in the woods, Grisha. You always liked mushroom soup. She’ll make it for you and you’ll eat it and be strong again – ”

“Soldat!”

“And I don’t see why I need to go back into cryofreeze at all! What good does it do? We could live at the dacha, Grisha, we could stay here through the fall at least, I could gather nuts and berries and mushrooms and there are so many potatoes growing, and if you would just _eat_ , Grisha, and I’m sure I could do much more good if I could be called on at any time, and they didn’t have to go through defrosting me! Just because that Nazi – ”

“Zola’s not a Nazi – ”

“Just because that filthy butcher designed a machine doesn’t mean we have to use it! Bury me in the Russian earth if you have to bury me at all!” 

“Stop trying to distract me!” says Grisha. There’s unexpected strength in his voice. “That’s out of my hands, Soldat. But I _can_ train your next handler, if you’ll tell me who you’d like!”

“Take Andrushka, then,” the Soldier snaps. He doesn’t know any of the others’ names. He only knows Andrushka’s because the others stole Andrushka’s cap and tossed it back and forth, shouting “Fetch, Andrushka! Fetch!” until the Soldier, maddened by the noise, stalked out to the yard to snatch the cap out of the air. 

He slapped Andrushka across the face with it before he crammed it back on his head. “Punch them, goddamn you! They’ll pick on you until you do!” 

Grisha looks ill. “Boykin?” he says, as if the Soldier knows the man’s family name. “Soldat, no. He’s pathetic.”

That’s the right Andrushka, then. “They’re all pathetic,” the Soldier snaps. “Stalin killed everyone who was worth a shit.”

“Pick someone else,” Grisha begs. “I want you to have someone to look after you when – ”

“I can look after myself!”

“You need someone to look after your interests when you’re frozen. Zola is still sniffing around to come back – ”

“Then send me to shoot him!”

“Soldat!” Grisha says. He stops, and all is silent but for the buzzing of Pelageya’s bees, and then Grisha says, “Soldat. I don’t want you to be alone when – ”

“I won’t be alone! You’ll be here!” 

“Soldat – ”

“ _No!_ ” the Soldier shouts. 

The strength goes out of Grisha. His legs give out. He crumples right on the path, as if he’s been shot in the head. The Soldier squats behind him, propping up his head, frantic. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry, Grisha, I’m sorry. You’ll be fine, you’ll be well, please.”

Grisha shakes his head. The Soldier is angry all over again, and gives him a little shake. “You _will_.”

Grisha’s face regains some color. “Soldat, please,” he says. “Don’t pick Andrushka. I want to know you’ll be taken care of when I’m gone.”

The Soldier’s throat closes. He can’t speak, and if he could all he can think to say is, _so you’re leaving me, then_ , bitter and angry, as if Grisha wants to be rid of him. 

Well, Grisha does want it; is _dying_ to be rid of him. The Soldier tries to help him and he won’t even eat his fucking mushroom soup. 

“Andrushka’s young and healthy,” the Soldier says bitterly. “He’ll last a dozen missions. If he doesn’t drink himself to death.”

A silence follows. The bees buzz among the plants. 

“Take me inside, Soldatik,” Grisha says. “Please.”

The Soldier picks him up. He’s very light. The Soldier’s healing ribs barely twinge. 

“I’ll read to you,” Grisha murmurs, as the Soldier carries him into the dimness of the house. “Snegurochka, just what you always liked.”

“The Chekists took the book,” he snarls. He sets Grisha down on the divan and moves away to look out of the window. His metal fingers press into the wooden windowsill. “The shepherd should have frozen,” he snaps, and wipes his face. “Then he could have always stayed with her.”

“Ice melts, Soldat. They both would have melted away.”

“Then at least they could have melted together in the spring.”

***

“Are you angry, Grisha?” the Soldier asks.

They are sitting side by side on a wooden bench by the wall, waiting as the technicians prepare the cryofreeze chamber. Grisha smiles at him. “With you? Of course not.”

The Soldier fidgets. The cryofreeze chamber is hissing. “Grisha – ” he begins. 

“Soldat,” Grisha says. “You’ll be good when I’m gone, won’t you?”

The Soldier bites his lip. Grisha touches the Soldier’s hair with a wasted hand. “I don’t want you to be too sad for me,” he says. “I’m ready. I’ve lived too long anyway. I – ”

The Soldier is covering his ears. Grisha falls silent. The cryo chamber huffs.

“If they’d let me stay out,” the Soldier says. His hands fall back to the bench. “If I could look after you – ”

“Soldat, Soldat,” Grisha says gently. “I’m just one man. I’m not important.”

“Yes, but…”

“Soldat,” Grisha says. “It wouldn’t make any difference.” 

The Soldier looks down. His metal fingers have splintered the edge of the wooden bench.

The cryotank begins to hiss again. The Soldier glances over at it, and then away. His heart is beating fast. “That cryotank is ridiculous,” he says. “They could use the money to fund schools, or hospitals…”

He chokes on the word _hospitals_. He works his jaw and falls silent. 

“You’re a good Bolshevik,” Grisha says. “You want what is best for the people and the Party, not just yourself.” 

The Soldier nods. He keeps his head down. 

Grisha puts a hand on his shoulder. He kisses the Soldier’s temple. His breath smells like vodka. “Moscow doesn’t believe in tears, Soldat,” he murmurs. 

The Soldier sniffs and straightens. He rubs off his face with his coarse jacket sleeve and attempts to smile at Grisha. “I’ll be all right,” he says. 

“Promise me,” says Grisha. 

The Soldier swallows. His throat feels swollen. “I promise,” he says. “I’ll be all right.” 

They sit side by side in silence. One of the technicians comes over. “It’s ready,” he says. 

The Soldier lumbers to his feet. He wants to say _do svidanye_ , but the words stick in his throat. They are not appropriate. He and Grisha will not meet again. 

He cannot walk away without saying anything. “Take care of yourself,” the Soldier says gruffly.

Grisha nods lethargically. It makes the Soldier frantic. He kneels down and grasps Grisha’s hands. “Promise me,” the Soldier insists. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”

“It won’t do any good, Soldat.” 

“Grisha – ”

“Soldat! You’re hurting me!” 

The Soldier lets go of Grisha’s hands. There are white marks on Grisha’s left hand from the crush of the Soldier’s metal fingers. “Forgive me,” the Soldier says. 

Beads of sweat stand out on Grisha’s forehead. But he smiles at the Soldier. “There is nothing to forgive,” he says, and stands up, drawing the Soldier with him. “I want to remember you smiling, Soldatik.” 

For a moment, the Soldier thinks he will not be able to do it. But then the corners of his lips twitch up, and he smiles, wide and luminous, showing his teeth. Grisha has tears in his eyes, and the Soldier wants to comfort him, but that is not what Grisha wants and in any case, there is nothing to say. 

The Soldier turns away. He walks to the cryo chamber, straight-backed, a swing in his step. He can’t smile anymore, so he does not look back.

**Author's Note:**

> 1956 was the year of the Hungarian Revolution. After waffling for a bit about their response, the Soviet Union sent in tanks to squash it. 
> 
> Politburo member Mikoyan did indeed visit Cuba in 1960, after Fidel Castro came to power, and came back to the Soviet Union to gush to Khrushchev about how the Cuban revolutionaries reminded him of his own boyhood revolutionary days. Khrushchev decided to start sending aid to Cuba on the strength of that report.


End file.
